1 894-] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 217 



affairs, so far, has not been charged to tariff tinkering, probably 

 because there is not another collector of insects among the 75 to 

 100,000 people at the head of the lakes, and therefore no opinion 

 has been expressed. 



This afternoon (July 26th) I walked 24 blocks through the 

 sparsely settled outskirts where I have heretofore found my best 

 butterflies, and saw during that walk only three specimens, one 

 V. antiopa and two Pieris rapes, and they acted unnatural and 

 nervous, as if lost from their natural haunts. One of the rapcB 

 hovered over a large clump of thistles in a gully coming down 

 from the hills, but the grasshoppers had gnawed deep into the 

 leaves between the thorns and from one to four sat braced among 

 the spines of the flower, mowing off the tops of the blossoms as 

 far down as they could reach, so Pieris rapcB passed on to another 

 stalk as it, no doubt, had been doing all day with hunger still 

 unsatisfied. 



V. antiopa bred again on the poplars, but in less quantities than 

 last year, and of a dozen cocoons I found under the porch of an 

 old building over half were partially gnawed away by grasshop- 

 pers. Last year, the first year of the grasshoppers, Lepidoptera 

 appeared in usual numbers, but seemed to live but a few days, 

 wandering off into the woods and out-of-way places in search of 

 food; this year no adults to speak of have appeared. One can 

 walk many blocks without seeing a single specimen of the most 

 common kinds. From this and the condition oi antiopa cocoons, 

 I infer that chrysalids of all kinds have suffered from the visitation. 



Numerous irregular holes, the size of a dime, in the musHn 

 curtains in the kitchen, brought down upon the heads of my chil- 

 dren the ire of our Swede domestic, but they soon exonerated 

 themselves by catching a number of grasshoppers in the act of 

 carving new ones; fine lace curtains in parlor suffer as well; in 

 fact, eternal vigilance is the price of curtains now-a-days. Ladies 

 and children bring them into the house in folds of their dresses, 

 and they eventually work towards the light eating anything about 

 the windows containing starch. 



One of our neighbors, who delights in decking her trim little 

 body in the most dainty of dresses, found a cool, comfortable 

 spot for her chair on the lawn, earlier in the season, and enjoyed 

 an hour or two in fancy work; later her friends suppressed a 

 smile when she related a harrowing tale about three great holes 



